Team uploads

Summary

Some packaging teams use a single mailing list that collects all bug reports, and allow normal uploads by team members without them being listed directly as Maintainer or Uploader. In that case, the special first line “ * Team upload.” will avoid to the upload to be confused with a NMU. Team uploads are supported by the debchange (dch) tool of the devscripts package, via a --team command-line option.

Rationale and history

An upload made by a developer who is not listed in the source package's Maintainer and Uploader fields is called NonMaintainerUpload. These uploads follow specific conventions. For packages where the maintainer is a team reachable through a mailing list, all team members do not need to list themselves in the Uploader field.

It was proposed in 2009 to formalise "Team uploads" in analogy to the "QA uploads", as a special case of NMU, where most conventions are relaxed.

In 2010, a new discussion was started. It was proposed that team uploads are regular uploads whose first changelog entry is “ * Team upload.”, to be used when a developer is not listed in the Maintainer or Uploader field of a package, but member of the team that maintains it.